Vanellope: You Were Never the Glitch

There is something about Vanellope von Schweetz from Wreck-It Ralph that I think is easy to miss beneath all the candy colors, racing, and humor. When we first meet her, everyone calls her a glitch. She doesn't fit the way the other racers do. She disappears and reappears unexpectedly, she can't leave her game, and she has been told over and over again that there is something wrong with her. She isn't simply excluded from racing. She has been convinced that she doesn't belong there in the first place. Watching her story as an adult, I think there is something incredibly powerful about a person discovering that the thing everyone told her was wrong with her was never the truth about who she was.

Vanellope has spent her life on the outside. The other racers make fun of her, exclude her, and make certain she knows she isn't one of them. What makes it especially painful is that they don't simply dislike her. They have accepted an entire story about why she doesn't belong. Vanellope is the glitch, and once everyone agrees upon that label, they don't have to look any deeper. They don't have to know her. The label has already told them everything they think they need to know.

I think labels can be incredibly powerful that way. Sometimes they help us understand things, but sometimes they become boxes people put us inside. Difficult. Different. Too sensitive. Too emotional. Too quiet. Too loud. Strange. Broken. Troublemaker. Not smart enough. Not capable enough. Eventually, if we hear something often enough, we can stop recognizing it as someone else's opinion and begin accepting it as our identity.

Vanellope does something I love, though. Even after everyone has told her she doesn't belong on the racetrack, she still wants to race. There is something inside her that refuses to completely believe what everyone else has said about her. She may not understand why she feels drawn to racing. She doesn't know the truth about her past yet. She simply knows that when she looks at that racetrack, something inside her says she belongs there.

I think sometimes there is a quiet voice inside us that knows something before we have the confidence to believe it. We feel drawn toward something even though other people don't understand. We have a dream that seems too big for the circumstances surrounding us. We know there is more inside us than what people have allowed us to become. Maybe we can't explain it yet, but something keeps whispering that the story other people wrote about us isn't the whole story.

Then Ralph enters Vanellope's life, and their relationship becomes one of my favorite parts of the movie because neither one of them really fits. Ralph has spent years being treated as the bad guy because that is the role he plays in his game. Vanellope has spent years being treated as a mistake because she glitches. They both know what it feels like to have everyone else decide who they are before getting to know them. Maybe that is why they eventually understand each other in a way other people don't.

Sometimes the people who understand us best are the ones who know what it feels like to be misunderstood themselves. There is something comforting about being around someone who doesn't require a long explanation for why something hurts. They recognize it because they have carried something similar. Our stories don't have to be identical for our hearts to recognize one another.

I also love how determined Vanellope is to build her race car. She doesn't have the experience everyone else has. She hasn't been allowed to practice on the racetrack. She doesn't even completely understand what she is capable of doing yet. But give her an opportunity and suddenly all that enthusiasm comes pouring out. She isn't asking someone to simply hand her a victory. She wants the chance everyone else has already been given.

There is an important difference between wanting special treatment and wanting an equal opportunity to show what you can do. Sometimes people don't need us to rescue them. They need us to stop standing in their way. They need someone to believe them, include them, give them access, or simply allow them the opportunity to try.

That becomes even more meaningful when we discover why Vanellope has been excluded. King Candy has manipulated the game itself to erase her identity. He has changed everyone's memories and convinced Vanellope that she is something she never was. The person in power needed her to believe she didn't belong because the truth about who she was threatened him.

That part feels surprisingly grown-up for a Disney movie.

There are people who benefit when we doubt ourselves. There are people who feel more comfortable when we remain small. Sometimes someone else's need for control can become a story about our inadequacy. If they can convince us that we aren't capable, aren't worthy, don't belong, or couldn't possibly succeed without them, we may never challenge the place they have assigned to us.

That is why it matters so much whose voices we allow to define us.

I think faith has helped me understand that more deeply. There are countless voices in this world willing to tell us who we should be. People have opinions about what makes someone successful, valuable, beautiful, productive, strong, worthy, and acceptable. If we try to satisfy every one of those definitions, we can spend our entire lives changing ourselves for whichever room we happen to be standing in.

But God knew who we were before anyone else had an opinion.

Psalm 139 tells us that God knew us before we were born. That means the world doesn't get to create our value because God was there first. Other people may misunderstand us. They may underestimate us. They may notice one piece of our story and assume they understand the entire thing. But their limited view doesn't change what God knows.

Vanellope eventually discovers that she wasn't some accidental flaw in the game at all. Her story had been altered. The identity she had accepted wasn't actually hers. There is something deeply moving about watching her begin to understand that the thing she believed about herself for so long was based upon a lie.

I wonder how many things we believe about ourselves that began with someone else's voice. Maybe we think we aren't good enough because someone repeatedly made us feel that way. Maybe we believe we are difficult because someone didn't know how to understand us. Maybe we think we aren't strong because our strength doesn't look like someone else's. Maybe we have spent years trying to fix something about ourselves that was never actually broken.

Sometimes healing begins when we question the story.

Is this really true about me, or have I simply heard it for so long that it feels true? Is this something God says about me, or something someone else decided? Am I actually incapable, or was I never given the opportunity to discover what I could do?

Vanellope finally gets that opportunity when she races. And then something wonderful happens. The glitch everyone believed made her incapable of racing becomes the very thing that makes her extraordinary at it. She can glitch through obstacles other racers cannot.

The thing she was taught to be ashamed of becomes part of her strength.

I love that message because sometimes the things that make us different really do become connected to the ways we are able to help, understand, create, or contribute differently. Someone who has walked through grief may notice another grieving person before anyone else does. Someone who has experienced being excluded may become the person who makes sure nobody else is standing alone. Someone who has struggled with something others didn't understand may eventually become an advocate for people experiencing the same thing.

Our difficult experiences don't automatically become gifts, and I don't believe we need to call everything painful a blessing. Some things hurt, and we are allowed to say they hurt. But I do believe God can redeem what has hurt us. He can take something that once made us feel isolated and use it to create connection. He can take something that made us feel weak and show us a kind of strength we didn't know we possessed.

I think Vanellope also reminds me that belonging doesn't mean becoming exactly like everyone else. She doesn't have to stop glitching in order to become a real racer. In fact, her glitch remains part of her. The goal was never to make Vanellope indistinguishable from everyone around her. The goal was for her to discover that being different never disqualified her from belonging.

There is so much freedom in that idea. We spend an enormous amount of energy trying to fit ourselves into places that reward sameness. We compare our personalities, abilities, appearances, careers, families, and lives to everyone around us. Sometimes we become so focused on whether we fit that we forget to ask whether we actually want to become like the people we are trying to fit in with.

Maybe belonging isn't finding a place where everyone is exactly like us. Maybe it is finding a place where we don't have to pretend to be someone else in order to stay.

One of the things I appreciate most about Vanellope is that discovering who she really is doesn't suddenly turn her into a completely different person. She is still mischievous. She is still funny. She is still a little chaotic. She is still Vanellope. Learning that she is actually a princess doesn't make her decide she needs to behave like some traditional version of one. She doesn't need the fancy dress or the expected role to prove she matters.

She finally gets to choose who she wants to be.

I think there is something beautiful about reaching a place in life where we stop living entirely according to other people's expectations. We can appreciate advice. We can learn from people who genuinely love us. We can grow, change, and admit when we are wrong. But eventually we also have to become comfortable living the life God gave us rather than constantly trying to make it look like someone else's.

Maybe that is why Vanellope's story means more to me now. She spends so much of her life believing she is the problem. Everyone around her reinforces that belief. Then she discovers that she was never the problem at all. She had been trying to understand herself through a story that wasn't true.

I think many of us carry a few false stories about ourselves. They may not have been intentionally planted by some King Candy trying to erase who we are. Sometimes they simply grew from experiences, relationships, criticism, rejection, comparison, or years of believing we needed to be something different in order to be enough.

Perhaps every once in a while we need to examine those stories and ask whether they still deserve to be believed.

God doesn't call us glitches. He doesn't look at the parts of us that are different and wonder what went wrong. He sees the entire person, including the parts nobody else understands. He knows the story before the labels, before the criticism, before the comparisons, and before we started wondering whether we belonged.

Maybe Vanellope's story is ultimately about discovering that the thing everyone used to exclude her never actually determined her worth. She didn't need to become less herself in order to belong. She needed the truth about herself restored.

And maybe some of us need that reminder too. We are not the names people called us. We are not the worst thing someone believed about us. We are not the rejection, the failure, the difference, or the difficult chapter. We don't have to spend our lives trying to correct ourselves into someone else's definition of normal.

Sometimes the very thing we have been trying to hide is part of what makes us uniquely able to navigate the road ahead.

Vanellope thought she was the glitch in everyone else's perfect world. Eventually she discovered something much more important. She was never a mistake that needed to be fixed. She simply needed the chance to discover who she had been all along.